Oliver Hill arrived in Richmond on the first day of May 1939, his 32nd birthday. Global events dominated morning headlines. A nervous world winced as Adolph Hitler demanded that Poland relinquish a 15-mile-wide swath of land connecting Germany and East Prussia. A day earlier in New York City’s Flushing Meadows Park, President Franklin Roosevelt had ignored Hitler’s saber-rattling to launch the much-anticipated World’s Fair extravaganza. In a speech broadcast nationwide and overseas, Roosevelt hitched the nation to a “star of goodwill, a star of progress for mankind … and, above all, a star of peace.”

Happy to be back in the city of his early childhood, impatient to start carving a professional name for himself, Hill scrambled to find temporary housing and begin introducing himself to the movers and shakers of black Richmond. “I am still meeting people and impressing them favorably, I hope,” Hill wrote soon after his arrival. Tall, prematurely balding, frequently sporting a cigar, the newcomer appeared both distinguished and approachable. He could chat easily with almost anyone, and his levelheadedness inspired confidence.

Meanwhile, Hill had a surprise to digest.

Attorney Byron Hopkins had signed off on the idea of a new law firm that included Hill. Another attorney involved in those discussions, Tom Hewin, had not. Hewin, who shared an office with his attorney father in the St. Luke Bank Building, apparently didn’t want to disrupt that arrangement. Besides, he was nowhere to be found.

A week after arriving in the city, Hill described Hewin’s odd behavior to [his wife,] Bernie: “Tom Hewin has been absent for about ten days. This morning we learned he is in New York. Whether that is the jive or not, I do not know. He goes on [drinking] sprees every now and then I have been told.”

The summer of 1939, as it evolved, proved to be a watershed for black activism in Virginia.

Adjusting to changed circumstances, Hill located office space at 117 E. Leigh St. in Jackson Ward. For a weekly rent of $5, he acquired use of a back room, a bathroom and shared reception space in a house where a friend had set up a medical practice. To save money, Hill began sleeping there as well. Bernie, awarded an undergraduate degree at Howard University’s June commencement, remained in Washington. Her teaching salary once again balanced the vagaries of her husband’s fledgling law practice.

Despite the collapse of plans for an official firm, both Hopkins and Hewin proved eager to involve the assertive, new member of Richmond’s black bar in their cases. Soon, Hill was joining one or the other as they traveled the region, tending to criminal and general law matters. Before the summer was out, he would be helping with NAACP anti-discrimination work as well.

He relished the challenge. “I’m very proud of my attorney husband who travels over the state in various cases,” wrote Bernie in early June. And, a month later, “I surely am glad you’re so interested in what you’re doing. … How do you like living in the office? Is the bed soft?”

Hill’s letters contain no mention of another Richmond lawyer, Spottswood Robinson Jr., but it seems certain that the newcomer would have crossed paths with his future law partner’s father. The ranks of black professionals were too small and too dependent on mutual support to think otherwise. When Spottswood III returned to Richmond in mid-June, after graduating from Howard University Law School, he and Hill surely interacted, as well. The nine-year age gap put the pair in different social circles, but each had developed a reputation that would have intrigued and attracted the other.

The summer of 1939, as it evolved, proved to be a watershed for black activism in Virginia. Years of NAACP grass-roots instruction and preparation coalesced in demands from the western Alleghany Highlands to the eastern Tidewater, from the North Carolina border to the outskirts of Washington, for greater fairness in voting, access to public facilities and improved educational amenities. The surge led Lutrelle F. Palmer, a prominent black educator and longtime editor of the Virginia Teachers Bulletin, to contend that historians would likely choose 1939 “as the turning point in what [had] seemed to be a futile and hopeless struggle.” Both Hill and Robinson were well positioned to ride that wave.

The increased activism occurred against a backdrop of rising NAACP visibility and expectation, nationally and statewide. Under the tutelage of President J.M. Tinsley, a compact and fastidious Richmond dentist, deeply committed to the cause, the Virginia State Conference of Branches had emerged as one of the advocacy group’s most successful state organizations. By 1941, the Virginia conference would boast more local branches than any other state NAACP group. Reflecting that success, Thurgood Marshall, head of the NAACP’s legal arm, in 1940 cited the Virginia and Oklahoma conferences as the only two “worth a dime.”

•••

Aline Elizabeth Black stood at the eye of the racial storm in Virginia that spring and summer. The accomplished chemistry teacher at Norfolk’s Booker T. Washington High School had agreed to lend her name to a lawsuit challenging the shameful imbalance in pay for black and white teachers.

Finding a teacher/plaintiff had proved to be no easy task. Donating money was one thing; opening oneself up to firing, or worse, required tougher mettle. Finally, in the fall of 1938, Black had stepped forward. Highly skilled and proud of it, Black considered the city’s pay scale to be an affront. The maximum pay for the port city’s black high school teachers ($1,105 for women and $1,235 for men) was only slightly higher than the minimum for whites ($970 for women and $1,200 for men). With an undergraduate degree from Virginia State College, a master’s from the University of Pennsylvania, a dozen years’ classroom experience and certifications to teach English, Spanish, science and chemistry, Black was an ideal candidate to insist on equal pay.

As an NAACP legal team including Marshall, Howard law professor Leon “Andy” Ransom and Hewin began preparing a lawsuit on Black’s behalf, other Virginia communities also roiled with discontent over discrimination. In Cumberland County west of Richmond, black children made up 63 percent of the school population but received only 27 percent of educational funds. In Essex County, northeast of Richmond, not a single high school served an almost two-thirds black majority. Supervisor of Negro Education Fred M. Alexander told of visiting a one-room school in which a single teacher served 118 black students. Comparable stories abounded across Virginia.

Against that backdrop, Black and her lawyers appeared in state court on May 31, seeking an order compelling Norfolk officials to set a single salary scale for black and white teachers. Paying Black less, solely because of her race, violated the equal protection and due process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, they argued. City attorneys countered that Black had waived those rights when she voluntarily signed a contract to teach under the existing pay scale.

Ruling from the bench, Judge Allan R. Hanckel displayed none of the enlightenment the NAACP had hoped for in picking Norfolk. He agreed with the city that Black’s contract trumped. Her lawyers immediately filed a protest with the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals.

The action coincided with Hill’s first weeks in Richmond. “Too bad about the Norfolk case or was it too bad?” Bernie asked in a letter a few days after Hanckel’s decision. “Maybe you all will plan an appeal, eh?” The reference suggests that, a month after his move to Virginia, Hill already was part of the circle weighing NAACP legal strategy.

Two weeks later, Black’s appeal became moot when the Norfolk School Board brazenly denied her a contract for the next teaching year. Black had no job, and the NAACP had lost its plaintiff. In New York, the national legal staff issued a furious rebuke: “The attitude of the Norfolk, Va., school board in denying Miss Black reappointment and deducting $4.01 from her check for the day she lost [due to her court appearance] is utterly shameless.”

A few days later, an estimated 1,200 black citizens jammed St. John’s African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in downtown Norfolk to protest the action. Within range of the nation’s largest naval base, a group of black schoolchildren, led by a Boy Scout drum and bugle corps, paraded down city streets, brandishing banners proclaiming, “Dictators — Hitler, Mussolini, Norfolk School Board,” and “Our School Board Has Vetoed the Bill of Rights.”

Outrage aside, the NAACP lawyers had no option other than to start afresh by seeking a new plaintiff.

•••

While the NAACP launched its search, other civil rights activities in Virginia did not languish. Close to midnight one evening in early August, Tom Hewin dropped by Hill’s office/home to enlist his help in a voting rights case in Greensville County. The Democratic primary was coming up the next week, and a group of black men known as the Hundred Men’s Club wanted a court order guaranteeing their participation.

Virginia operated under a decade-old federal court ruling qualifying blacks to vote in primary elections paid for by the state. Still, it could be hit or miss as to whether local election officials complied. Hewin and Hill agreed to make sure Greensville County’s did.

Working into the night, the pair drew up necessary papers. The next morning, they launched off on the 60-mile trip to the county seat, Emporia. After hearing the arguments, the judge agreed that black voters should be allowed to participate in the primary. He was not going to assume that the election officials would act improperly, however. Hill and Hewin could monitor the next Tuesday’s election. If problems arose, they should seek an immediate compliance order.

A decline in lynching since the fever-pitch days at the turn of the century did not mean that the noxious practice had been erased. Charred and mutilated bodies still swung from Southern trees.

The follow-up to the judge’s ruling produced what was, for Hill, the single most frightening episode of his civil rights work. Over the years, a cross would burn in the Hills’ yard, and he would receive numerous threatening letters and phone calls. But no episode alarmed him more than one as he and Hewin drove the lonely, leafy back roads of Greensville County that August primary day, looking for possible election trouble. They did not doubt that word of the court action brought by two cheeky, big-city lawyers had preceded them. Nor did their imaginations need travel far to envision the sinister welcome party that might await them around any turn. Earlier in 1939, jazz singer Billie Holiday had released her rendition of “Strange Fruit,” with its chilling image of lynched bodies. Now it was moving up the Billboard charts.

Moreover, the region was no stranger to racial violence. Fourteen years before Hill and Hewin’s visit, a 500-person mob in neighboring Sussex County had dragged from the county jail James Jordan, a 22-year-old black man accused of attacking a white woman. The frenzied throng hanged Jordan from a tree, riddled his body with bullets and burned the remains to a crisp.

A decline in lynching since the fever-pitch days at the turn of the century did not mean that the noxious practice had been erased. Charred and mutilated bodies still swung from Southern trees.

As Hewin and Hill rounded a curve in Hewin’s 1936 Ford, the road plunged down a steep hillside to a covered bridge over the Meherrin River. Suddenly, a swarm of white men holding rope, sticks and long poles took shape. Alert to the danger, Hill scanned the setting for an escape route. He saw none. The only option was to drive forward. As they slowly descended the hill, one of the men blurted out what both were thinking, “Looks like this is it.”

“Sure does,” the other replied.

Reaching the bridge, they slowly inched the car through the crowd. No one stopped them. About midway, Hill saw a gaping hole in the side of the structure. Then he recognized the object of the white men’s concern — not two black lawyers, but a car that had gone off the side of the bridge. The crowd was attempting to pull up the car with the poles and rope.

“Looks like they’re fishing — trying to fish that automobile out of the river,” Hill joked, easing the tension. Exhaling, he regained his equilibrium.

A short stretch down the road, Hewin pulled the car to a stop and offered the wheel to Hill.

“ ‘I’m too weak [to drive],’ ” Hill recalled Hewin’s saying.

Both men thought they had been riding into a lynching — their own.

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